"I look at
a chop on a plate, and it means death to me. I would like some day to trap a
moment of life in its full violence, its full beauty. That would be the
ultimate painting."

Francis
Bacon, "Distorting into Reality", TIME, June 8th, 1962.

"No
one else is Francis Bacon - there is an irreducible specificity to his
being-in-the-world - but as with every other artists, on can read off
of Bacon's work the totality of art history, a totality his work endlessly
retotalizes and projects towards the future."

Dana Polan, Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze and
the Theatre of Philosophy, Routledge, 1994.

"Bacon's
work is the most profoundly disquieting manifestation I have yet seen of
that malaise, which since the last war, has inspired the philosophy of
Sartre [There is] a literary parallel in Kafka's nightmares of frustration,
which largely owed their inspiration to Kierkegaard's philosophy of
despair."

Nevile
Wallis, Nightmares, The Observer, 26th November, 1949.

"In a
back-street behind Piccadilly, a man may sometimes be encountered wearing a
huge pair of sun-glasses, grey flannel coat, tight trousers, grey flannel
shirt, and black tie. He walks rapidly into the darkness. He has
cropped hair, a round puffy face and looks about 35. He is in fact in his
early fifties - his conquest of age at once gives him a slightly spooky,
Dorian Gray quality - and he is the painter, Francis Bacon... He is, indeed,
a freak."

"If you go
into one of those big butcher's shops, especially Harrods - it is not to do
with mortality like lots of people think, but it's to do with the colour of
meat. The colour of meat is so powerful, so beautiful really. People ask me
why my pictures have this feeling of rawness and mortality. If you think of
a nude, if you think of anything going on around you, think how raw it all
is. How can you make anything more raw than that?.. I really work to try and
excite myself. I never expected my work to sell at all. I do sell bits but
not with any ease."

"Bacon is a
self-taught painter but that does not prevent him from being a masterly
painter. He is even a masterly illusionist. The texture of flesh
is something that is no more difficult for him to render than it was for
Courbet or Rubens. And that is his ultimate secret, for no sooner has he
presented us with the convincingly painted illusion, so that we believe in
it, optically, then he defaces it, as though he were mocking our belief.
The flesh becomes ambiguous and ghostly; it becomes ectoplasm as we watch
it. Bones become jelly, bodies become alarmingly vulnerable, belief
gives way to doubt."

Eric
Newton, Mortal Conflict, The Guardian, Thursday May 24th,
1962.

"Somehow
Francis got to the centre of your life. Being with him was such an
enlivening experience that you wanted to have him at the centre of your
life. I don't think he could have got through life being as difficult as he
was if he hadn't had a hugely positive and vital effect on the people around
him. You tended to get swept up in it."

Michael
Peppiatt, The Observer Magazine, Sunday January 29th, 2006.

"It
is a cliché to say that Francis Bacon's lifelong theme has been despair. But
in the light of this latest painting I think we should begin to look
back on his work and ask whether the cliché is really true. There is
something here more deliberate, more chosen and more willed than
despair. Something vicious and purely evil."

Richard
Dorment, on Bacon's 1988 Second Version of Triptych 1944, The
Daily Telegraph, 3rd February 1989.

"A great
artist leaves deep traces. Francis is as much alive after his death as he
was when he was here. He was a transforming person. If you met him and spent
time with him, you couldn't help but be changed, and this effect goes on. I
think that's one of the signs of great genius, a person who actually
transforms the lives around him."

Michael
Peppiatt, The Independent On Sunday, March 9th 2003.

"For
Bacon's is not fundamentally an art of exaggeration: it is the exaggerations
in ourselves, or in our neighbours, which we dread to recognise. Bacon's art
reveals to us, often for the first time, and with the impact of prophecy,
the true nature of the world we live in... And are the events which Bacon
sets before us more dreadful than those of which we read every day in the
newspapers?"

John
Russell, Titian Crossed With Tussaud, The World of Art, The
Sunday Times, 27th May, 1962.

"It is
Bacon's revolutionary treatment of the head that is his greatest overall
achievement. No one, not even Picasso, had dared to twist and mould
the skull and the face as Bacon does, smearing them, scooping great
hollows out of them, turning them inside out, and yet always retaining a
likeness which, as in the case especially of George Dyer and Henrietta
Moraes, become more compelling and unmistakeable the more violent the
distortion."

"When one talks about paintings, it's all nonsense. It has its language and
anything else is a bad translation. I do feel the need to paint. I paint for
the excitement which comes when the image comes across but I also hope luck
will work with me in paint. I have always painted to excite myself. For me
images are ways of unlocking the valves of sensation. It is when you stop
fumbling around and the images crystallises or when you realise you can take
it further."

"The two
sexes met in Francis Bacon, more than in any other human being I have
encountered. At moments he was one of the most feminine of men, at others
one of the most masculine. He would switch between these roles as
suddenly and as unexpectedly as the switching of a light. That duality did
more than anything perhaps to make his presence so famously seductive and
compelling and to make him so peculiarly wise and realistic in his
observation of life."

"Sir John [Rothenstein] mentions Nietzsche as one of the
writers Bacon constantly re-reads, and something he wrote in The
Genealogy of Morals has a bearing on a recent remark of Bacon's: 'I have
deliberately tried to twist myself but I have not gone far enough.'
Nietzsche wrote that is the self-tyranny and delight of the artist to 'give
form to himself as a piece of difficult, refractory and suffering material'.
Bacon sets no limits to his elf tyranny. What more can be done he will do."

Robert Melville, Francis Bacon, Studio International,
July 1964.

"Very few people find their real instincts. Every now and then
there's an artist who does and who makes something new and actually thickens
the texture of life. But it's very rare. You have to be able to be
really free to find yourself in that way, without any moral or religious
constraints. After all, life is nothing but a series of sensations, so one
may as well try and make oneself extraordinary, extraordinary and brilliant,
even if it means becoming a brilliant fool like me and having the kind
of disastrous life that I have had. That is it."

"Well, I
think that Berger did a lot of damage. By promoting lousy artists instead of
good ones. He had a lot of influence. He was a very effective writer and a
very good broadcaster, but meanwhile, a painter like Francis Bacon couldn’t
sell any pictures in this country. The standard price of a Bacon at the
Hanover Gallery in the early 50s was 300 or 350 pounds, and nobody was
buying them. Here was a great painter and Berger was too damn stupid to see
that. Too prejudiced, too bigoted, too puritanical. He was also too simple
and schematised."

David
Sylvester, About David Sylvester, Frieze, Issue 30, September
- October 1996.

"Everything Francis Bacon depicts he distorts. And yet every depiction, even
if we cannot describe or name the thing depicted, has the infallible ring of
truth. An indescribable biomorph hangs down from a wire cage. A boneless,
quivering mass of gelatinous flesh drowns in a sink or sits huddled over a
toilet. Bacon is obsessed with movement within suspension, and with the
suspension of movement. An expressionless face decomposes before our eyes
into a psychotic omelette. A violent jet of water is frozen and immobilized
as it streaks across the canvas. "

"Francis
Bacon is, to me, the main guy, the number one kinda hero painter. There's a
lot of painters that I like. But just for the thrill of standing in front of
a painting... I saw Bacon's show in the sixties at the Marlborough Gallery
and it was really one of the most powerful things I ever saw in my life
[...] The subject matter and the style [are] united, married, perfect. And
the space, and the slow and the fast and, you know, the textures,
everything. Normally I only like a couple of years of a painter's work, but
I like everything of Bacon's. The guy, you know, had the stuff."

David
Lynch, interviewed by Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, Faber and Faber,
1997.

"To tell you the truth, no abstract painting has ever given me the
exhilaration of figurative painting. In fact, it bores me. Profoundly When I
first heard of Rothko, I thought, well, here is going to be somebody doing
the most marvelous things, like Turner, in abstraction. But the problem -
with all of abstract expressionism - comes from lack of subject. I think
that no matter how far you deviate from it, you need the discipline of the
subject. You need the pulsation of the image, the force of the image, to go
beyond decoration. Which Rothko didn't have. It was always a beautiful
decoration."

"Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion seems derived from
Picasso's Crucifixion, but further distorted, with ostrich necks and button
heads protruding from bags - the whole effect gloomily phallic, like Bosch
without the humour. These objects are perched on stools, and depicted as if
they were sculpture, as in the Picassos of 1930. I have no doubt of Mr
Bacon's uncommon gifts, but these pictures expressing his sense of the
atrocious world into which we have survived seems [ to me ] symbols of
outrage rather than works of art. If peace redresses him, he may delight as
he now dismays."

Raymond Mortimer, New Statesman and Nation, 14th April
1945.

"He could
not draw. His ability to paint was limited and the way he laid the pigments
on the canvas was often barbarous. He had no ideas, other than one or two
morbid fancies arising from his homosexuality, chaotic way of life, and
Irish fear of death. What he did have was a gimmick, something resembling an
advertising-designer's logo. In his case it was a knack of portraying the
human face or body not so much twisted as smeared our of shape. It was
enough. Such a logo could easily be dressed up by the scriptwriters of the
Industry into an image of 'our despairing century'; it fitted their
favourite words: 'disquieting', 'disturbing'..."

"With a few
exceptions, a few singularities like Francis Bacon, art no longer confronts
evil, only the transparency of evil. And representation stops having any
meaning... I am now looking over the bulk of writing on Bacon. For me, it
all adds up to zero. All these commentaries are a form of dilution for the
use of the aesthetic milieu. What can be the function of this type of object
in a culture in the strongest sense of the word?... Bacon is officially used
as a sign, even if, individually, everyone can try to pursue an operation of
singularization to return to the secret of the exception they represent."

Jean
Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, The MIT Press, 2005.

“The
thing is one can’t really talk about painting, only around it. After all if
you could explain it why would you bother to do it? You always hope that the
paint will do more for you, but mostly it's like painting a wall when the
very first brushstroke you do gives a sudden shock of reality that is
cancelled out as you paint the whole surface. What one longs to do above
all, I think, is to reinvent appearance, make it stranger, and more
exciting. What one wants in art nowadays is a shorthand where the sensation
comes across right away. All painting, well all art, is about sensation. Or
at least it should be. After all, life itself is about sensation.”

"Picasso is
the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to
paint. In 1929 I saw some completely revolutionary pieces, Le baiser
and Les baigneuses. The figures are organic. They were my inspiration
in The Crucifixion. Picasso was the first person to produce
figurative paintings which overturned the rules of appearance; he suggested
appearance without using the usual codes, without respecting the
representational truth of form, but using a breath of irrationality instead,
to make representation stronger and more direct; so that form could pass
directly from the eye to the stomach without going through the brain.
Picasso opened the door to all these systems. I have tried to stick my foot
in the door so that it does not close."

Francis
Bacon, The Last Interview: “I painted to be loved”, Francis
Giacobetti, The Art Newspaper, June 2003.

"He was
extremely tough, Bacon, even though he could look effeminate and
acquiescent. He could take a lot of punishment. At the doctors, they could
take out stitches without anaesthetic. He had a high threshold for pain...He
was somebody who received and gave a lot of friendship. He had a large
capacity for it - a bit like his capacity for drink and life in general. He
was a very, very vital person because he slept very little, you know, I
mean, even though he had all that drink inside him, he just had a few hours
sleep and then he'd be back in the studio working again...He was very vital
but he could also be very destructive. You had to be fairly resilient to
stay the course. I was fascinated with him, so he became a very
central part of my life."

Michael
Peppiatt, Love is the Devil; Gay Times, September, 2006.

"This
Byronic aspect to his nature had something to do with a complete absence of
sentimentality, a recklessness, a bleak rationality, an awareness that his
lack of religious faith was in itself despair and also an intense animalism.
The animalism was the first thing one felt on meeting him, a palpable
magnetic field. He wanted to conduct this nervous energy into his painting,
to vent its expressive power. On one occasion I was standing close behind
him when an artist he disliked entered the room. Immediately he stiffened,
bristled, became alert as a dog. It was the only time I have witnessed the
hairs stand up on the back of a human neck. No fight ensued, or hostile
conversation. It was more menacing than that. As a younger man he must have
been capable of being quite terrifying..."

John McEwan, Francis Bacon, The Sunday Telegraph,
May 3rd, 1992.

"Mr. Francis Bacon always paints on the wrong, the unprimed, side
of the canvas and perhaps this may be considered typical of his whole
approach to his art and of the way in which he always makes difficulties for
himself. Difficulties for himself, but not, of course, for those of his
admirers, who remain fascinated by the wilfulness of his imagination, the
cryptic unpleasantness of his iconography, and his seemingly inexhaustible
capacity for discovering yet more perverse and unpromising themes for
large and monumental compositions. For these it would be a bitter
disappointment if he turned the canvas round and painted some everyday theme
in an ordinary way that would permit one to judge, as it is almost
impossible to do from most of his work, the real extent and character of his
talent for painting."

"Bacon’s true genius was realizing through an expression of jouissance the
fundamentals of what would later grow into postmodern ironies. He thrust
this idea of jouissance against the physicality of flesh, reducing us
all to meat, and translating the ecstatic moment—sensation, into a visual
expression or the literal and metaphorical violence of confronting the
awareness of our own mortality. He expressed with paint how human violence
had reached an apex that nullified its significance and left the only
alternative an embrace of jouissance. Bacon never one to deny his
connections to the sensations of the Real, fully embraced them instead.
Unlike the postmodernism that grew out Warhol’s silkscreened, star-fucking
irony, Bacon’s postmodernism grew out of a full acceptance of decadence."

"I 'm not
sure whether I was Francis Bacon's concierge or his butler, but intrusive
strangers certainly believed that I had the entrée to his domain. I used to
get calls from famous photographers saying that they were great fans of my
writing and could they take my picture. I knew what was coming if I didn't
speedily decline. 'Would it by any chance be possible to photograph you in
Francis Bacon's studio and then perhaps do the two of you together if he
happens to be there at the time?' The comedy of being importuned in this way
was a nice bonus for having done a book called Interviews with Francis
Bacon, which had been widely translated. His love of talking about art
made the recordings easy. The hard part was the editing. Interviews with
artists, even when they have Bacon's turn of phrase, tend to sprawl and
repeat themselves; I wanted the printed version to be economical in
exposition and coherent in structure."

David
Sylvester, My brushes with Bacon, The Observer, Sunday
May 21st, 2000.

"Since his
death in 1992, Bacon has gone through all the vicissitudes of a modern
master - the disputes over galleries and suspect drawings, the ghastly
biopic, and, in a muted sort of way, the critical reaction. Now that
Sylvester himself has gone I think that curators and museum directors feel
an inexplicable weight lifted... Bacon was an apolitical, good-for-nothing gambler with no
principles to blind him to reality. And that is why it fell to him to
acknowledge the real meaning of the atrocities whose photographic evidence
appeared all over the world with the defeat of Germany... Bacon took the
spiritual heart of high culture and stuck a knife right through it... Bacon
was a very overt atheist... Bacon puts religion itself in the dock. He was
Irish, after all."

"Bacon himself dated his artistic coming of age to the Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion of 1944 and imposed the orange
triptych (now famous, but which Eric Hall, Bacon’s companion, had trouble
persuading the Tate to accept it as a gift) as the fons et origo of
everything he had painted. Thenceforth by order of the artist no works prior
to 1944 were allowed into the canon – although Bacon had been painting for
some twenty years previously… John Russell’s perceptive monograph begins
with the Three Studies, and the interviews that David Sylvester
conducted and edited brilliantly make only the briefest mention of anything
that happened before. Similarly, in later life, Bacon insisted that all
retrospectives show nothing prior to 1944."

"There is
no doubt that Bacon has a power to upset and to convey distress that reaches
very far. Although he denies it, I think this has to do with a view of
experience that comes close to existentialist ideas...There is certainly
an enormous visceral power in Bacon's imagery. Some British critics go on
now about Bacon being evil. This is the line that's being taken quite
often - that the implicit negation in Bacon's work makes it impossible for
him to be a truly great painter. I don't agree with this. If you read
responses in the late fifties and early sixties to Bacon, you find people
within the Anglican church saying that he is a religious painter because his
paintings convey poignantly the absence of God. The sense of absence is so
strongly voiced that it amounts to a lament."

"Now
the scream was not to do with expressionism because I am not expressionistic
I have nothing to express. I was absorbed by the idea of the colour of the
mouth, the teeth, the saliva; you may say the beautiful red and purples of
the interior rather of the mouth rather like Monet was obsessed by haystacks
and the light falling on them from hour to hour. I don’t know whether its
aesthetic or whether is an obsession by colour, and saliva and the mouth
opening and the teeth, I don’t know whether that’s aesthetic or not. If you
look at a wound, after all there are degrees of a wound: it can be bright
red, it can be purple, it can have beautiful colours of pus it can be like a
marvellous Monet landscape. If you are unconcerned with the person who is
wounded you would look at the wound and you would see the marvellous colours
that wounds produce."

"A
tough guy himself, Beard attributes the same machismo to Bacon. 'I hate the
way Derek Jacobi minces about in that movie. I never saw one homosexual bone
in Fran's body!' (At the very least, this counts as an original view.) 'He
was strength on strength,' bellowed Beard. 'He was the Rock of Gibraltar,
the best of British. Hell, he wasn't camp, the guy used to take a leak in
the sink! One time when we were walking through Paris, a car ran over his
foot. The driver jumped out to help, but Fran just shrugged like the stoic
he was. Next day his foot was so swollen he could hardly walk: that's what
Hemingway called grace under pressure.' ... Peter Beard noticed
Bacon's weakness for uniforms made from animal skins and polished to a high
shine, and drew the obvious conclusion: 'Fran sure as hell loved the Third
Reich!' Bacon once gave a figure he painted a swastika armband; he
disingenuously claimed that he liked the crooked shape and had no interest
in what it signified."

"I
also avoided him personally. But there was another thing in that alienation
from Bacon and that was, I was angry with him about his ridiculing Jackson
Pollock. I thought that his dismissal of Jackson Pollock, who is a greater
artist than Bacon, of course, was... I just found it impossible to take. And
I felt alienated from him. Of course, Bacon never stopped pouring scorn on
Pollock... Well, I don't know if it was defensive. Bacon was pretty scornful
about most artists and he rejected most of his own work, too. But I mean he
did reject most things. Two of the artists to whom I have been... both whom
I admire most and with whom I've been friendliest, Bacon and Giacometti, I
dislike the way in which they found so little other art that pleased them
and that they accepted."

David
Sylvester on Francis Bacon, The John Tusa Interviews, BBC 2001.

"My
painting is not violent; it’s life that is violent. I have endured physical
violence, I have even had my teeth broken. Sexuality, human emotion,
everyday life, personal humiliation (you only have to watch
television)—violence is part of human nature. Even within the most beautiful
landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other;
violence is a part of life. You are born, you fuck, you die. What could be
more violent than that? You come into this world with a shout. Fucking,
particularly between men, is a very violent act, and don’t let’s even
mention death. In between we fight to protect ourselves, to earn money; we
are humiliated daily by stupid idiots for even more stupid reasons. Amidst
it all we love or we don’t love. It’s all the same anyway; it passes the
time."

Francis
Bacon, The Last Interview: “I painted to be loved”, Francis
Giacobetti, The Art Newspaper, June 2003.

"With Heidegger, and even more so with Sartre, Bacon has always asserted
than man's being is 'being in the world'; thus, for him as well,
'beyond the body is silence, nothing'. Death means to cease being in
situations; it is the moment of extreme phenomenological truth experienced
by the body. In an interview, Bacon has stated that 'death is the
shadow of life, and the more one is obsessed with life, the more one is
obsessed with death'. This bracketing is always potential, latent,
offset by the feverish tension of living, which finds, as we have seen,
one of its most effective exorcisms in eroticism. But when death
appears as a stark and hermetic inevitability, no future barrier can can
remain between these two parallel obsessions that finally meet in the
infinity 'nothingness'. Nothing remains for the painter now but the
compassionate yet relentless reporting of the ultimate, the final
cry."

Lorenza Trucci, Francis Bacon, Abrams, Inc., New York, 1975.

"I
would like to characterize Bacon's pictures as aphoristic images,
approximated by what Russell calls Bacon's pursuit of the single picture. By
this I mean images concentrated into the sententiousness of the symbol, but
which, because they can never be finally specified in meaning, effect a
transformation of undisciplined emotion between themsleves and the
spectator... The sense of oblivion of being in Bacon's pictures is due to
the fact that they are meant to be nothing but appearances abstractly
charged with emotion, rather than images of any reality - images with any
kind of objectivity, which occurs in them only accidentally. What is
normally accidental or momentary, the release of pure - undisciplined -
emotion, is made absolute in Bacon... For Bacon, art is a game of
emotionally charging appearance rather than a question of presenting clear
meanings, of whatever kind, and certainly not the political and religious,
which are usually taken literally..."

"Bacon's
pessimistic philosophy also makes connection with the gallows of humour, the
humour noir, of so much modern literature bred in the emotional
climate of World War II, among which he particularly admires the prose of
Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Like these severe but tonic writers,
Bacon feels his art represents the simple unalloyed truth of existence
as he perceives it, no matter how hard to bear that reality may be.
For him, the philosophical Existentialists and their literary followers set
the tone with their perception that the basic problems of existence were
loneliness, the impenetrable mystery of the universe, and death.
Basically, Bacon believes in a form of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's
nihilism and certainly, too, in the aspect of the Greek ideal that Nietzsche
so enthusiastically endorsed, the Dionysian conquest of pessimism through
art."

"Today
there is no tradition and no myths, people are thrown back on their own
sensibility. Abstract art was perhaps one attempt at getting away from this,
but it never worked because the artists made their own patterns in their own
ways. That is why American art is, on the whole, boring. They want to start
from nothing. I understand their position: they are trying to create a new
culture and identity. But why try to be so limited? I am trying to work as
close to my own nervous system as I can, but my painting is not illustrative
and has no message; it is an image. If I wanted to express philosophy I
would write – use words, not paint. Also painting is an old man’s
occupation. Some of the greater have done their best work in old age: Titian
and Picasso and others. So I hope shall go on and drop dead while working.
When all is said and done what matters is instinct."

Francis Bacon, The Images of a Master, by Shusha Guppy, Telegraph
Sunday Magazine, November 4th, 1984.

"Since his
death in April 1992, Bacon has rarely been out of the press. Indeed, he
often seems to be more alive than ever, with his myth growing more
extravagant by the year, as if his existence had been transformed, like a
pharaohs, into a vast archaeological dig, with 'finds' being made regularly
and reported to an eager public. Numerous paintings long thought lost or
destroyed have now come to light; others have been found missing and must at
least currently be catalogued with the chilling phrase: 'Present Whereabouts
Unknown.' The paintings lost and found have, however, received nothing
liker the attention accorded to the voluminous batches of drawings that have
surfaced. Here the shades of Bacon have been taken to task since, throughout
his life, the artist made a special point of repeating in interviews and to
all those who would listen in private that he 'never' drew."

"A double
drama became associated with Bacon: There was the struggle of a desperate
man who destroyed most of his own work; and, there was, too, the
violence of the imagery in the paintings that did survive - meat decomposing
or people screaming. For years Bacon was inseparable from rumour and legend.
His nonchalance towards the preservation of his own work, his pleasure
in gambling, his visits to André Gidean North Africa, were all threads
in the story... Bacon is in his early fifties, but does not look it.
It is neither the regularity of his work habits nor the circumspection of
his life that has given him his remarkable youthfulness. On the contrary, he
has never spared himself, never been a man to take it easy... No other
painter of Bacon's generation in England (a mild lot) has
displayed the particular qualities of nerve and obsession that seems to
characterise the best modern painters in other countries."

"The
Bacon we know now is a far more rounded and believable figure than the Bacon
who died in 1992, and as the man most responsible for the unbelievable
Bacon, David Sylvester, is also dead, I feel able to quote what Francis,
within months of death, said of him in an interview recorded in a book soon
to be published (though it may yet be bowdlerised and frustrated by those
who administer his estate) - 'I think David Sylvester is a very intelligent
man, but I don't think he has a genuine feel for painting he has no critical
sense.'This is
evident enough in the many Sylvester-Bacon interviews on which recent
writers on Bacon so heavily depend. For the most part these were conducted
on the premises of Marlborough Fine Art, Bacon's eximious dealers, in the
presence of one of its directors, Valerie Beston, and the early drafts were
not only much corrected and adjusted by her, but contain interpolations that
are hers rather than theirs. Who was Miss Beston, and what her right to be
both Bacon's recording angel and, occasionally, his voice?"

"Bacon's vision from the late 1930s to his death in 1992 was of a pitiless
world. He repeatedly painted the human body or parts of the body in
discomfort or want or agony. Sometimes the pain involved looks as if it has
been inflicted; more often it seems to originate from within, from the guts
of the body itself, from the misfortune of being physical. Bacon consciously
played with his name to create a myth, and he succeeded in this. What is
different in Bacon's vision is that there are no witnesses and there is no
grief. Nobody painted by him notices what is happening to somebody else
painted by him. Such ubiquitous indifference is crueller than any
mutilation.In
addition, there is the muteness of the settings in which he places his
figures. This muteness is like the coldness of a freezer which remains
constant whatever is deposited in it. Bacon's theatre, unlike Artaud's, has
little to do with ritual, because no space around his figures receives their
gestures. Every enacted calamity is presented as a mere collateral
accident."

John
Berger, Prophet of a pitiless world, The Guardian, Saturday
May 29th, 2004.

"Events of a terrifying brutality unfold in these sumptuous paintings. What
are we to make of them?... Should we indiscreetly turn to Bacon's own
tormented life story in search for a key to his work? Francis Bacon's nature
undoubtedly concealed considerable depths of suffering and conflict. To
realize this one only need take note of the poignant asymmetry of his
features.. But even if his life experience was more painful than that of
many other people, this alone is not enough to invest his work with any
peculiar relevance... Dr Moreau tortured animals to reshape them in his
image. In Bacon's paintings it is the very image of man which is taken
apart, and its bleeding flesh brought up from the 'depths' and laid before
one... Bacon's art, with its admirable form and heartrending subject-matter,
may thus be compared to the symptom which, in the deep of night, harrows and
plagues one until one awakens from a heavy philosophical sleep. The
suffering victim in these works is not Bacon alone, but man in his essence -
man who has wandered, unaware, into an uncommendable road, utterly unsuited
to his needs."

Michael Gibson, A Question of Terror; Bacon - A Special Issue
of Connaissance des Arts, 1996.

"The
painting of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is of importance to contemporary
thought because it shares with contemporary theory important insights
concerning the real. Bacon understood, as did thinkers like Jean Baudrillard
(1929-2007), that we never know the real, merely the appearances behind
which it hides. Art, for Bacon, was about feeling and sensing until an
appearance could be rendered which stands in for the real. According to this
view, the simulation – the painting – is understood as more real than what
we see. It is these characteristics of Bacon’s work that are most appealing
to contemporary theorists who, like Baudrillard, believe that theory is a
challenge to the real. For Bacon the artists 'feelings' (and what he often
referred to as 'sensations') are very much what Baudrillard saw as vital to
'the soul of art'. By looking at the ways in which the thought of these two
radically independent thinkers dealt with the real we see how artists and
theorists can share important epistemological insights. In the case of Bacon
and Baudrillard it is an epistemology which values enigma,
unintelligibility, and a resistance to collective meanings or truth."

"Accident, instinct, sensation, the unconscious - these concepts were
central to Bacon's aesthetic reflections... Accident, as Bacon understands
it, is not manifested in the sort of beauty that Lautréamont described as
the 'fortuitous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a
dissecting table', Such anticipation of the the Surrealsists' collages shows
Bacon's lack of interest in uniting two apparently irreconcilable realities
on a plane where they seem not to belong, in the manner of Max Ernst...
Accident's territory is essentially in the palpable signs of the artist's
work process; it manifests itself in the traces and marks of the
paint-saturated brush on the canvas... In any event, Bacon endeavours to
take accident as a departure point, to accept what has arisen spontaneously
as the initiation, yet then to modify, to transform, to control it and
finally to ascribe some function and hence some of the apparently
meaningless, be it a sense of the resistant, the unassimilable, the
disconcerting or the grotesque...The element of chance that Bacon invokes
obviously has nothing to do with automatism or spontaneity; in his
terminology the accidental is bound to the force of instinct, which plays a
central role in his thinking."

Armin Zweite, Accident, Instinct and Inspiration,
Affect and the Unconscious; The Violence of the Real, Thames &
Hudson, 2006.

"To
understand the force of Bacon's images we have to understand the way
in which they undercut the regime of representation. Now this regime is
described by the fact that it ties together my wish to see and what is
presented to me, a unity of the scopic field and the spectator. But when the
gaze as an object becomes detached from this scene, a dislocation occurs. A
gap opens up—the circuit is broken. The illusion of wholeness has been, as
it were, castrated. In fact we can treat Bacon's images as just
that—castration erupting within our wish to see, within the scopic field...
One no longer has vision, but the eye lives on. The function of vision has
been subtracted from the eye. The violence of sensation has squeezed out a
literal essence of being, the lamella, a puddle of being. To claim that the
lamella appears in Bacon's work is to claim that he has taken the detachment
of the gaze to its limit. The painting are as far as possible withdrawn from
the painting of everyday life, while yet capturing the 'appearance' of a
human being. The violence of the painting is the correlate of the violence
of appearing. What is at stake is not violence but paint."

Parveen Adams, The Violence of Paint; The Emptiness of the Image,
Routledge, New York, 1996.

"Francis
liked to say, 'I'm only attracted by men at least 30 years older than me.'
But there came a time, rather a lot later, when he said, 'The awful thing is
that now the people older than me are too old to do anything.' ... He had a
boyfriend - an ex-fighter pilot who, since Francis had got older and his
tastes had changed, was younger than he was. He really fell in love with
him. He was a rich fighter pilot, or certainly well off, and he was
sadistic, which Francis liked. He knocked Francis about and beat him up.
Once, when I saw Francis, one of his eyes was hanging out and he was covered
in scars. I didn't really understand the relationship - after all, you
don't. But I was so upset seeing him like this that I got hold of the
pilot's collar and twisted it around. He would never have hit me because he
was a 'gentleman' - do you see? - he would never get in a fight. The
violence between them was a sexual thing. I didn't really understand all
this. Anyway, I didn't talk to Francis for about three or four years after
that. The truth is, Francis really minded about this man more than anyone."

"The
paintings of Francis Bacon embody his passionate and determined challenge of
'fate' in its various guises. His marked fascination for Aeschylus' Orestes
or Christ rests with their having questioned fate, while the Eumenides or
Furies of Greek mythology, first presented in Three Studies for Figures
at the Base of Crucifixion (1944), became a leitmotif in the English
painter's work. Even the manner in which Bacon approached the canvas was
described by him as a struggle between the artist's will and the
'inevitability' of the paint. But what is fate for many of us Bacon
preferred to call chance or accident. The distinction for him rested with
the artificial explanations or beliefs we impose upon life. Bacon attacked
these relentlessly because they engender an unquestioning and destructive
acceptance of the vagaries of life, or, simply put, they result in a
fantastic approach to life... In large part what Bacon admired of the writer
he read was not what could be appropriated and re-formulated through the
language of paint, but rather what could not. "

John
G. Hatch, Fatum as Theme and
Method in the Work of Francis Bacon,
Artibus et Historiae,
Vol. 19, No. 37, 1998.

"A
dozen or so years ago Bacon himself was still alive. He was extremely
successful and, by the standards of the day, very rich. Millionaires
scrambled for his work and endured long waiting lists at Marlborough Fine
Art, his dealer... Here is England's most celebrated recently dead painter.
He is probably the best-known one, and possibly the most popular, since JMW
Turner. But Turner painted things the English love: landscape, grand and
tender effects of weather and light, images of mountains and the sea which
are saturated with primordial, romantic power. He couldn't draw a portrait
or paint a figure that didn't look like a worm or a spindle, but that had no
effect on his reputation. Whereas Bacon's main subject and primal obsession
is the human figure, radically reshaped and engaged in an activity that,
before 1969, was punishable in England - and quite often was punished - by
criminal prosecution, social obloquy and jail. A small step for a man, but a
giant leap for (consenting, adult) mankind. This painter of buggery, sadism,
dread and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the most implacable,
lyric artist in late 20th-century England, perhaps in all the world."

Robert Hughes, Horrible!, The Guardian, Saturday August 30th 2008.

"He
took the Crucifixion, stripped it of all its Christian implications, and
invested it instead with the universal beastliness of man and abattoir,
running with blood, deafened with screams. As a ortrait painter he was not
the friend with insight but the harsh interrogator, the man outside the ring
of light with lash and electrodes close to hand. His prisoners, presidents,
popes and old friends squirmed. He used the ideas of the trap, the cell, the
cage, the X-ray and heavy fall of light to imprison and torment his subjects
to distil the violence, and to assault complacent senses with graceless
nakedness on the lavatory pan and vomit in the wash basin... Bacon took the
vile, sexually and politically obscene, and shudderingly visceral, and
lifted them with paint so that we might contemplate ferociously profane
images of cruelty and despair and see in them inheritance from the great
Renaissance themes of religious and temporal power. Titian, Rembrandt and
Velázquez might not have cared for Bacon's work but they would have
recognised kinship in his astonishing mastery of paint and the profound
pessimistic atheism of his images. He was the perfect mirror of the spirit
of our age."

"Being there almost guarantees that the gruesome and horrific are
disregarded in the heat of the moment. Bacon's work aspires to this
condition, to the status of reported or recorded real-life. The real world
is played up whilst precedents in painting or ideas of modern art are played
down... Bacon encourages accidents whilst making the images in order to
produce a deeper memory of the event. The encouraged accident may produce
forms and shapes that trigger in the artist and the spectator heightened
emotional responses, 'I think the whole process of this sort of elliptical
form is dependent on the execution of detail and how shapes are remade or
put out of focus to bring in their memory traces' (The New Decade: 22
European Painters and Sculptors)... Given this ambition Bacon could not
be satisfied with abstraction; he needs the human form as subject... Memory
is destructive since it is most powerful when it remains hidden from our
conscious mind and appears to us unresolved in our unexplained actions.
Bacon, like Proust is striving to make himself and us aware of these 'memory
traces' and excites himself to provoke their reception on his canvases.
Perhaps this is his subject matter, the concern to discover our hidden
memory and to stimulate its approximation in paint."

"Bacon
never makes a drawing. He starts a picture with a loaded one-inch brush of
the kind that ironmongers stock, and almost the entire work is painted with
such brushes. In these broad brushstrokes, modernism has found its skin: the
'works' no longer show. The hole of the screaming mouth is sometimes the
point of deepest recession in these pictures; or a little white arrow floats
in front of the canvas and the rest of the picture starts at a depth which
the eye judges to be behind the canvas; the canvas is thus rendered
non-existent. But nothing can enter Bacon's pictures and remain abstract,
and a small thing - an arrow or a safety pin - is anything but unassuming in
a world of large undetailed forms. It is like a fly in a prison cell. It
assumes the proportions of a Visitor or a Familiar, or even a Warder. The
fact that nothing will be discovered about it increases its reality... Bacon
is not making it any easier to paint pictures. His known works are few in
number because he is compelled to destroy many canvases. When he works on a
canvas, intellect, feeling, automatism and chance, in proportions which he
will never be able to calculate in advance, sometimes come to an agreement.
During the last twelve months these agreements have been more frequent;
therein lies a hope for painting."

"Bacon today can do what
he likes with paint. He can make the naked human body gleam and glow; he can
make a doorknob or an unshaded light bulb into an object of wonder; and he
can paint the human eye in such a way that we reconsider the whole
relationship of watcher and watched. He could always fold space,
and even knead space, in ways peculiar to himself. But when the “great
irremediable things” are faced head-on in the new paintings he settles for a
grave ordering of the given space; spare verticals and strict horizontals
offset the turbulent poetry of the human images. That poetry is always
rooted in fact. No matter how fragmented
the figures or how extreme the distortion, those who have known them will
recognize the sudden hunch of the shoulders with which Lucian Freud will
pounce upon a new topic; the strange, burrowing, sideway motion with which
George Dyer walked; or the way in which Bacon himself will sit sideways on
an old cane chair with sleeves rolled up above the elbow and the compass
needle of his attention flickering wildly to and fro. All this comes second,
one may say, to the beauty of the paint, which grows more startling year by
year. But that beauty is not gratuitous. It is the servant of impulse, not
the master; and nothing quite like it has been seen before."

John Russell, Art of a New Francis Bacon Is at Met, The New York
Times, March 20, 1975.

"Bacon
himself has often suggested that his distortions clear away veils and
screens, and reveal his subjects, 'as they really are'... Manifestly, Bacon
does not idealise: but , in a similarly universal way, he denigrates.
It really does not matter whose likeness he exploits: their face will emerge
as that of 'a gross and cruel monster' 'and nothing else'. For Bacon,
an individual's face is no more than an injured cypher for his own sense of
the irredeemable baseness of man... Bacon's numerous critical supporters
have repeatedly insisted that he is a great 'realist' who paints the world
as it is. Michel Leiris has recently argued that Bacon 'cleanses' art
'both of its religious halo and its moral dimension'. Bacon himself has said
that his paintings can offend, because they deal with 'facts, or what used
to be called truth'. Yet Bacon is indifferent to particular truths
concerning the appearance, and character, of his subjects. No one could
accuse him of being a respecter of persons: in his view, men and women are
raw and naked bags of muscle and gut, capable only of momentary spasmodic
activity... Whether one accepts Bacon as a 'realist' or not will depend upon
whether one shares his particular view of humanity. Bacon is an artist of
persuasive power and undeniable ability; but he has used his expressive
skills to denigrate and degrade. He presents one aspect of the human
condition as necessary and universal truth."

"At
the heart of Bacon's attitude towards man - his almost invariable subject -
is the conviction that 'man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is
a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without purpose,
other than of his own choosing'; the conviction, too, that the circumstances
in which the artist lives and works today make painting (and the pursuit of
any art) difficult to the verge of impossibility... Within a few years of
his devoting himself fully to painting Bacon was able to find a solution to
the difficulties of his own situation: namely to ensure that the paint
itself should make an even greater impact than the theme - which he is apt
to term the 'story'. The 'story' he cuts down to the barest essentials...
Bacon is not only a pessimist about the human condition but about the
virtual impossibility of his realizing his own aims as a painter; he has
come in fact to believe that they cannot be realized without the aid of
chance... By the arresting originality of his representation of reality - an
originality that owes much to his reliance on chance to the audacity of his
forays across the frontiers of the irrational - Bacon may portend the
revival of an art which, unlike the predominant art of today, makes no claim
to be self-sufficient but seems instead to communicate, however ambiguously,
truths believed to transcend it."

"Francis
opened the door, smiled and said: 'The portrait's finished! I want you to
sit in that chair over there and look at it.'... In front of me was an
enormous, coloured strip-cartoon of a completely bald, dreadfully aged - nay
senile - businessman. The face was hardly recognisable as a face for it was
disintegrating before your eyes, suffering from a severe case of
elephantiasis: a swollen mass of raw meat and fatty tissues. The nose spread
in many directions like a polyp but sagged finally over one cheek. The mouth
looked like a painful boil about to burst...The hands were clasped and
consisted of emerald green scratches that resembled claws. The dry painting
of the body and hands was completely different from that of the wet, soggy
head...The head and shoulders were outlined in a streaky wet slime. Francis
expected that I would be shocked. He was a little disconcerted. He said it
gave him a certain pain to show it to me, but if I didn't like it I needn't
buy it...To me the picture was of an unusual violence. The brushwork, the
textures, the draughtsmanship were against all the known rules... I was
baffled. Could I ever hang the canvas in any place that I live in? The
harshness and ugliness would surely give me a 'turn for the worse' each time
I saw it... I came a way crushed, staggered, and feeling quite a great sense
of loss."

"In
Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera there’s a wonderful moment
when the scene shifter describes to the girls of the corps de ballet that he
has seen the ghost in box five he describes the ghost to the girls and he
says, in a way in which logic itself can’t tolerate, but clearly we know
exactly what he means, he says: and the ghost has no nose and that no nose
is a horrible thing to look at. It’s something that isn’t there but should
be. I want to suggest that one dimension of the achievement of Bacon is in a
sense to take this problem on board directly... What people describe as
being ugly we should consider it a defence and if you can undo this defence,
if, like Bacon, you can propel the spectator into the midst of meat and find
it not only human but essentially human, then, as it were, you remove some
of the defences which so often kind of disable, I don’t mind putting it
bluntly, disable public taste. It is a struggle. Now if something like this
is the case, that I’m more than aware that I haven’t said directly anything
about architecture and texture, then one of the ways we might consider the
issues this evening is to think within the scope of Bacon’s adult career
what also happens within architecture to be able to do that: at the level of
a certain materiality and at the level of texture, that is to say, to
undermine the public defence against the ugly and actually to propel it
towards something new and powerful and human not in a humanistic way but
human almost in a somewhat unnerving way.”

"The late Peter Fuller had little sympathy with Bacon's subject-matter,
which he slightingly parodies (Daily Telegraph, 28 October 1989) as
'lonely figures still throwing up in lavatory bowls beneath naked light
bulbs, [who] occasionally... hunch together on couches for some barbarous
act of congress, or be sprawled disgorging their abdomens'. Nor did Fuller
admire Bacon's use of paint, saying that he 'applied pigment as if he hated
the stuff, dragging it across the raw, unsized canvas which drains it of
beauty and of all semblance of life.' Lest we feel the homophobic boot is
not well and truly slammed home he added, for good measure, 'Bacon's
technical inadequacies seem to me to be inseparable from his spiritual
dereliction.' While Bacon, the urbane and ultracool artist, acted out his
part, his paintings give some idea of his inner turmoil and anger. His
paintings of Dyer present his lover as twisted, distorted and virtually
disembodied. One portrait, Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror
(1967-8), shows Dyer sitting in what looks like an office swivel chair, his
disembodied face, split down the centre, reflected in a lectern-like stand.
On the painting are two splurges of white paint splashed across the surface
reminiscent of semen defacing the image. Whether indicative of the sexual
dimension of their relationship, or of the need to assert a particular
personal expression of possession, even in an image, it was Bacon going
public on a profound and deeply important part aspect of his emotional
life."

"Seeing a
work by Francis Bacon hurts. It causes pain. The first I saw a painting by
Bacon, I was literally left speechless. I was touched so profoundly because
the experience was one of total engagement, of being dragged along by the
work. I was perplexed about the level on which these paintings touched
me: I could not even formulate what the paintings were about, still less
what aspect of them hurt me so deeply...This inability to reflect upon the
very aspects of works that touch one most seems to be caused by a momentary
loss of self... According to most critics of Bacon, his works are about
violence, torment, fragmentation, loss... No critic has admitted that the
violence itself exercises a particular attraction for him or her; yet when
one asserts the thematic centrality of violence, while at the same time,
expressing admiration, such an inference is hard to avoid... Bacon's work is
often seen as destructive and scary. But once we engage in the work this
opinion seems warranted only by the superficial appearance of the images.
Bacon's view of the self is, ultimately, uplifting. For his refusal to allow
his figures to be defined by the 'other' results, paradoxically, in a loss
of self that re-subjectifies the body. The self is secured by resisting
gender-positions and by resisting any discourse on identity. And this
resistance, seen as an ongoing bodily movement, is the self."

"Bacon has
always denied that he set out to emphasise horror or violence. In a chilling
series of interviews conducted by David Sylvester, he qualified this by
saying: ‘I’ve always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I
possibly can, and perhaps, if a thing comes across directly, people feel
that that is horrific’. He explained that people ‘tend to be offended by
facts, or what used to be called truth’. He has repeatedly said that his
work has no message, no meaning, or statement to make beyond the revelation
of that naked truth... No doubt the ‘horror’ has been over-done in popular
and journalistic responses to Bacon. But it is just as naïve to think Bacon
is simply recording visual facts, let alone transcribing ‘truth’. Creatures
like those depicted in Three Studies can no more be observed slouching
around London streets than haloes can be seen above the heads of good men,
or angels in our skies. Of course Bacon’s violent imagination distorts what
he sees. But the clash between Bacon’s supporters and the populists cannot
be dismissed as easily as that. The question remains of whether Bacon’s
distortions indeed reveal a significant truth about men and women beyond the
facts of their appearances, or whether they are simply a horrible assault
upon our image of ourselves and each other, pursued for sensational effects.
And this, whether Bacon and his friends like it or not, involves us in
questions of interpretation, value and meaning."

"To an existential
artist like Bacon, chance is very important, both as a rubric for the
universe (his hobby is roulette) and for what it brings about on canvas.
Facial features are blurred as if they and the pigment from which they are
formed had been pummelled into the final image. (This is often literally
the case, since Bacon paints with rags and his hands as well as with
brush). Look how close oil paint comes to the stuff of life, he seems to be
arguing. If the painter is lucky, impulses of memory and desire may allow
him to manipulate the stuff so as to trap elusive and temporal
personalities, and our feelings about them. Bacon would bring technical
devices out into the open and reinstate them as images. The famous boxes
which circumscribe his male nudes, popes, business executives and monkeys
start life as methods of containing space and end it as prisons out of Kafka
or, prophetically, scenes from the trial of Eichmann. His brush strokes
become rapid at this time (he does no preliminary drawing) and blur into one
another. Bacon is unique in this century in his ability to render the
indoor, overfed, alcohol-and-tobacco-lined flesh of the average urban males.
His painting is how most of us look. Like Eliot's early poetry, Bacon's
paintings are documentaries of nervous stress. Given the era in which we
find ourselves living, this comes as no surprise."

"Bacon's painterliness is a way of getting under the skin of things, of
destroying their matter-of-fact surface appearance and revealing the flesh
of feeling they are made of... The unlocking of the feeling in form, as
Bacon calls it, does violence to the image. For Bacon, this violence is a
way of forcefully referencing reality, as well as an emphatic statement of
his assumption that reality in general is violent... The flesh of Bacon's
figure shows the mad music of uncontrolled or undisciplined sensation
rebelling against any conformity to the outer order of things - symbolized
by the mask of the face - and becoming a kind of idea in itself... There is
no harmonious togetherness in Bacon's world, only conflict and
self-conflict, self-torture and torture of the other. Perhaps this is why
the couplings never do depict anal intercourse, but only the
inconclusiveness of their struggle. The one figure cannot really take the
other from behind, nor do they confront one another. Their union is,
literally, a stalemate and dead-lock... In general Bacon's handling of flesh
can be understood as the climactic act of his attempt to fuse fact and
feeling, the conscious and unconscious, the critically controlled and
accidentally instinctive, the illustrative and imaginative, the photo-slick
technically reproducible and the singular texture of particular sensation.
All the dichotomies come together in the flesh, which is simultaneously
commonplace, and charged with rare personal feeling."

"Since the
death of Picasso, Francis Bacon has more than any other painter provided the
age with an image, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, of its accelerated grimace. The
key to his work is its ambition. He has taken on the great masters of the
past without their mythological resources or their requirement to record
events. At the same time he has turned his back on the abstract artist’s
indulgence in decorative introspection: the painting whose principal subject
is itself and the fact that someone painted it. Although his subject matter,
the visual impulse which triggers his attempts to fashion an image on
canvas, derives from his own sensibility and is to that extent egoistic,
Bacon is the least narcissistic of artists. He uses some recollection or
preoccupation which is at hand, so to speak, as a prompt for an act of
painting. But it is the paint alone, and what happens as a result of its
being pushed around on the canvas, which can provide an image of great
externality and force, influencing the viewer with a life of its own and
doing this independently of the artist. Bacon is in some respects closer to
being a sculptor than a painter. The background to his paintings, which are
applied at the end, act as a kind of plinth for the images poised upon them.
It is sad that Bacon’s eminence occasions, as is often the case with major
artists, so much photographic reproduction of his work. The physical
grandeur, the sensual texture of his paint outweighs the often horrifying
imagery it encapsulates. In reproduction it is the imagery that tells."

Grey
Gowrie, The Accelerated Grimace, The Alligator, 16th January
2009.

"Two
naked figures, faces obscenely eroded by electric-blue shadows, sprawl on a
bed. A man huddles like a baboon on the edge of what might be a swing, a
coffee table or a hangman's drop. A Pope howls silently behind glass.There is
little need to say who painted them. At 62, Francis Bacon is one of the most
immediately recognizable painters in the world. For the past 25 years,
critics have predicted the collapse of his reputation. Yet by now it seems
that Bacon is one of the very few living artists whose work can (but does
not always) exhibit the mysterious denseness of meaning, the grip on
experience, which are the conditions of a masterpiece. 'Who ever heard,' he
once sarcastically asked, 'of anyone buying one of my pictures because he
liked it?'... Bacon's work is the kind that invites stereotyped reactions.
He is seen as a master of crisis, directing a horror movie. The adjective
most often given to his work, nightmarish, is not quite true to Bacon's
intentions; it does not go far enough. For nightmares, like movies, end.
Bacon's images, on the other hand, are thrust at us as the enduring
substance of reality. They are not fantasies, but observation slits into a
Black Hole of Calcutta, in which man thrashes about, stifled by
claustrophobia and frustration, stabbing with penis or knife at the nearest
body. This, Bacon insists, is the real world; it defines the suppressed
condition of actual life ... Bacon's work is not pessimistic (or optimistic,
for that matter), for it lives outside these parentheses on a terrain of
amoral candour about the most extreme situations."

Robert Hughes,Out of the Black Hole, TIME Monday, December
13th, 1971.

"The
late Francis Bacon might not appear to have very much in common with an
anonymous 15th- century painter of devotional art from Pskov but his Small
Portrait Studies at the Marlborough Gallery share a lot of the
characteristics of holy Russian icons. If the icon-painter's conventional
treatment of the human face makes the saint seem like a being suspended
between this world and the next, real yet also holy, Bacon's self-created
figurative conventions tend in the opposite direction. Rendering people as
restive blurs of swiped paint, he makes of them an odd blend of the human
and the animal. Bacon's portraits, like icons, use the transfiguring
capacities of painting to talk about the capacity to be transfigured that is
inherent within all people - but the difference is that, whereas the icon
speaks of an upward transfiguration, an ascent to holiness, Bacon's
paintings see only the possibility of people becoming still less than they
are. For the abstract gold ground of the icon, symbol of holiness, Bacon
substitutes lurid grounds of dark red, green, pink or yellow: his people
exist not in a sacred void but simply in a void. But these paintings are
less despairing than they are often made out to be. At their best (up until
the late 1960s), Bacon's small portraits have a kind of savage, joyous
vigour and carnality which communicates not existential gloom but a weird
form of celebration - something like the manic exuberance of someone who
knows he does not have long to live but has decided (what the hell) to enjoy
being alive while he can. These pictures find a kind of spiritual strength
in the denial of spirituality."

"The
experience of a work of art's formal unity has, since Kant, been seen as a
manifestation of some metaphysical unity: the unity of the faculties of
cognition, or as an intuition of the unity of the Spirit. It is seen, in
other words, as a symptom in one way or another of man's at-homeness in the
world. 'I hate a homely atmosphere', Bacon has said discussing the
disjuncture between his painterly painting of forms and figures and the flat
and linear handling of the backgrounds and inanimate objects with which they
co-exist. 'I always feel that malerisch painting has a too homely
background ... I want to isolate the image and take it away from the
interior of the home'. Another device Bacon has used to isolate figures is
the space-frame, those perspectival lines that seem to demark often
invisible enclosures, but which sometimes become part of the architecture in
which figures or forms exist. Bacon's is an emotive pictorial space, the
space-frames are spatially incoherent. They refuse a consistent depth as
well as two-dimensional pattern. They help to deny the integrity of the
picture plane, that connoisseur's happy ending, that banality of good taste.
Bacon's space is unsystematic, renegotiated, tested against affective
resonance, against its imaginative life... In the discontinuities of
pictorial language and space, Bacon articulates a rhetoric of the closed
circle of the soul in a world that has lost meaning, lost coherence. But the
isolation of figures within the space-frames is only an intensification of
the predominant characteristic of most of his paintings; the isolated figure
within the actual frame. Figures and forms alone within the rectangle of the
canvas."

"Bacon
himself has suggested that his distortions clear away veils and screens, and
reveal his subjects, ‘as they really
are’. But before we assent to this, we must first go along with Bacon’s
judgement on his fellow human beings. […] There is only one aspect of human
being which he attends to. Manifestly, Bacon does not idealise: but, in a
similarly universal way, hedenigrates. It really does not matter
whose likeness he exploits: their face will emerge as that of ‘a gross and
cruel monster’ [the reference here is to Churchill’s outraged description of
Graham Sutherland’s portrait of him, later destroyed] ‘and nothing else‘.
For Bacon, and individual’s face is no more than an injured cypher for his
own sense of the irredeemable baseness of man. Bacon’s numerous critical
supporters have repeatedly insisted that he is a great ‘realist’ who paints
the world as it is. Michel Leiris has recently argued that Bacon ‘cleanses’
art ‘both of its religious halo and its moral dimension’. Bacon himself has
said that his paintings can offend, because they deal with ‘facts, or what
used to be called truth’. Yet Bacon is indifferent to particular truths
concerning the appearance, and character, of his subjects. No one could
accuse him of being a respecter of persons: in his view, men and women are
raw and naked bags of muscle and gut, capable only of momentary spasmodic
activity. ‘Realism’ in art inevitably involves the selective affirmation of
values. Whether one accepts Bacon as a ‘realist’ or not will depend upon
whether one shares his particular view of humanity. Bacon is an artist of
persuasive power and undeniable ability; but he has used his expressive
skills to denigrate and to degrade. He presents on aspect of the human
condition as necessary and universal truth."

"The
experience of viewing paintings through glass is, of course, common for
older works. The shift towards an emphasis on surface that characterized
much avant-garde picture-making of the twentieth century, however, meant
that the use of glass in framing became a rarity. In this context, Bacon’s
insistence upon retaining it, despite employing complex facture in his own
works, acts to call attention to it.25 The unusualness of seeing an
avant-garde painting mounted behind glass makes the spectator aware of what
is a relatively common but usually overlooked visual phenomenon. The
mirroring effect of the framing produces a disturbance in the field of
vision. If the required act of filtration is not performed then the
spectator must see their reflection in place of the work of art and thereby
confront their act of seeing. The glass includes the beholder and the
gallery space in the painting as a kind of interference or noise. It works
to produce what can be described as a ‘making strange’ both of seeing and of
the picture surface. In his essay ‘Art as Technique’, Victor Shklovsky wrote
that the ‘technique of art is to make objects ‘‘unfamiliar’’, to make forms
difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the
process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged’.
Bacon could be said to cultivate just such an aesthetic, a teasing, perhaps
even sadistic, one in which the pleasure of visual comprehension is, at
least initially, deferred. The way Bacon’s paintings are framed does not
detract from the pictorial surface for beholders but actually draws them to
attend to it through the labour of divining what lies behind the darkling
glass. The unruly reflections that thwart easy looking also constitute an
assault on vision. The spectator is made to think about what it is to lose
sight, to reflect on the invisible. "

Nicholas Chare, Upon the Scents of Paint: Bacon and Synaesthesia,
Visual Culture in Britain,20o9.

"Bacon demands from his viewer an intense and appalling involvement with the
'figure' in his paintings. Distorting a celebrated motif nevertheless also
implicitly cites the image as official artistic doctrine and precedence;
Bacon hereby violates the aesthetic 'nervous system' (his metaphor) of the
spectator through the formal qualities of his craft: form and paint and
surface. Casting the pant as the protagonist in this artistic vision, Bacon
is very much in line with the Abstract Expressionists and the modernists
more generally... The 'smear' characterising much of Bacon's middle and late
work conveys the mobility of the image in the painting; its compulsion to
'free' itself from its imprisonment within representation, what Bacon
himself calls 'the energy within the appearance'... The leaking and bleeding
in Bacon's portraits make the figure's struggle for formal presence
palpable. On the other hand, the transparent box ensures a formalization
that contains the threat of total collapse... The smear frees the viewer as
well, who finds herself not only viewing the figure and the subject matter,
but also participating in their 'liberation' from their own defining
qualities - form and paint - through her own consciousness of the acts of
painting and viewing... Reality is no longer a visual issue but a
sensational (in both senses of the word) and experiential one... The action
of leaking involves the spectator in a most deliberate and specific way. In
a manner evocative of Antonin Artaud's ideas for a theatre of cruelty,
Bacon's work assaults the viewer's sensibilities in a visceral manner."

"The
elusiveness of Francis Bacon's paintings to critical analysis are a measure
of their success. As much as one is tempted to examine a particular
influence on Bacon's work, and the temptation is great since Bacon has been
quite forthcoming in acknowledging his sources, it is practically impossible
to draw direct and, consequently, revealing parallels. Furthermore, focusing
on any single element in one of Bacon's paintings usually undermines the
meaning of the work rather than clarify it. In a sense, though, this was
Bacon's objective. In one of his last Interviews, Bacon observed: Most
of the time when one talks about painting, one says nothing interesting.
It's always rather superficial. What can one say? Basically, I believe that
you simply cannot talk about painting, it just isn't possible. Yet, Bacon's
paintings have been talked about a great deal with varying success, as one
might expect. Part of the problem is that Bacon himself could not
refrain from talking about them, fueling an interest in possible links
between his work and that of painters like Van Gogh and Degas, or writers
such as Aeschylus, Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot. That poets and playwrights
are mentioned frequently by Bacon is rather curious since he prefaced the
passage cited above by noting: Painting is a world of its own, it's
self-sufficient. In addition, his desire to allow narrative to play
only a very minor role in his work seems to preclude any parallels with
literature. But bacon stressed his favourite authors too often for them to
simply be ignored in the context of his own work... In large part what bacon
admired of the writers he read was not what could be appropriated and
re-formulated through the language of paint, but rather what could not."

John G.
Hatch, Fatum as Theme and
Method in the Work of Francis Bacon,
Artibus et Historiae,
Vol. 19, No. 37, 1998.

"Bacon
couldn't stand the sight of his own features. Those puffed-up cheeks made
him look like a fat toad. The haunted expression of his eyes transformed the
toad into a charming monster. He was one of those artists who spend their
lives trying to discern their own image in alien things. Maybe homosexual
cravings include the desire to see oneself in the mirror of another's
eyes...When we came face-to-face for the first time (ahead of his Moscow
exhibition), our hectic conversation, lubricated by a bottle of Famous
Grouse, left me feeling that he wasn't talking to me but through me—to
himself—as if he was reacting not to my words but to the echo of his own
thoughts. I might just as well have stood up and walked away, leaving him
with a tape recorder... Every artist is a despot of a kind, like all
tyrants. Bacon was particularly sensitive regarding his image in the eyes of
others. He seemed almost to have a mortal fear of being taken for someone he
didn't want to be, and of being unmasked as someone he didn't suspect he
was. Paradoxically, that Godlike terror of a clearly defined identity made a
ferocious atheist of him. The person who believes in his own uniqueness
cannot believe in the existence of an afterlife. The existence of an
afterlife implies that your life will be reshaped all over again in a
similar vein. That, in turn, means that your life in this world, as a work
of art, was a flop. After all, how can a work of art be regarded as unique
and perfect if it can be repeated somewhere else, re-created and emulated by
someone else, even if by the hand of God?"

Zinovy Zinik, A Pickled Nose; Mind the Doors: Long Short Stories,
Context, 2001.

"Bacon's images present the fragmentation that the viewer as subject should
recognize as the original inner-sense experience. Their condition is not the
result of violence, but conversely, their independence from the violence
normally wrought by visual perception. Van Alphen assures us that the only
place violence arises as an issue is in the viewer, in whom a temporary loss
of self creates pain...Surprisingly perhaps, he focuses upon Bacon's use of
the painted blur just as Russell does, and for rather similar reasons. That
blur, he feels, articulates the fragmented state of the figures presented,
and as such, it visually traces their various sense perceptions. In
Reclining Woman for example, the swirling pigment and the figure's
position express the rapture of orgasm...Russell aesthetically appreciates
the visibility of Bacon's paint, while van Alphen philosophically lauds it.
While Russell appreciates Bacon's space for its increasingly convincing
quality, however, van Alphen appreciates its ever indeterminate character We
can see this indeterminacy in mirrors that don't reflect but alter, frames
of images that don't contain but release, and shadows that do not project
but redefine. The space in Bacon's work absorbs the figures as they spill
from their corporal confines, a process seen most clearly in Two Figures
in the Grass, where the figures and space merge into one entity. Van
Alphen feels that this lack of figural-spatial boundaries creates a pool
into which visible traces of the figure's sensations can spill and
accumulate, enhancing viewer awareness of the figure's sense perception. The
viewer's enhanced awareness guarantees a loss of self."

"Bacon is the man of the moment. But will his reputation last? The impact of
his paintings is is unforgettable - coming on one of his huge,
horrific canvases is like being hit in the crotch - but it is not the kind
of sensation that normally reverberates down the centuries. Yet it seems
more and more likely that bacon will be the big British painter of our age.
Few painters share his power to conjure up a shape without literally
describing it, to create images which are in tangible but at the same time
vividly arresting, to create a world of his own in each picture so that you
seem to be peering into it through a mental keyhole... Bacon is slightly
fey-looking, soft-moving, soft-speaking man, civilised and intelligent, with
that elusive anonymity which creates a stronger personality than
hairy-chested forcefulness. He slips through any kind of labelling... The
slash of paint with which he transforms the features of a friend is a
gesture of love so fierce that it makes a revolting wound. 'Each man kills
the thing he loves,' quotes Bacon from Oscar Wilde - and he adds, typically,
'Is that true? I don't know.' Tension breeds violence, and violence is
everywhere in Bacon's work. You feel the presence of a sensibility so
delicate that the gentlest stimulus is an assault. 'I believe that anything
that exists is a violent thing. The existence of a rose is a violence.'...
Bacon has dredged deeply and agonisingly into the spring of existence. What
he brings up is murky, rich, even rank, but it is certainly one aspect of
truth. I believe that future generations will continue to be moved by it,
and even, which might alarm Bacon, find it totally beautiful."

"Bacon is
an artist who works slowly and whose self-criticism forces him to destroy
much. He produces perhaps eight or ten canvases a year… Without formal art
training, Bacon did not begin to paint till he was thirty. His inspiration
lies in the things of the world: cheap post cards of Monte Carlo, the banner
headline. Photographs of Goering and Goebbels, and the photography of
Muybridge. A Bacon painting is eloquent of the terror of real life; it is
unglamorous, very real, very heartless… When Bacon’s paintings began to
appear in the 1940s, the adjective most commonly used to describe them was
‘disquietening’. He had, at first, a cold reception and many critics wrote
hostile or frivolous reviews… It might also be said that his paintings have
a case history quality. In 1953 Bacon started his series of paintings based
on Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X. In these paintings – he does not know
the number of them - he used a face smear technique. One would be inclined
to say the face had been meticulously painted, then partly rubbed out by
great strokes of a gigantic eraser, in order to confound the eye. What are
the hyena-cardinals doing – delivering hysterical sermons or diabolically
quizzing an unseen prisoner? We cannot say. These shattered pillars of the
church are seen variously. The Seated Cardinal, for instance, wears a
pinkish-blue cape and vestment, painted in sick dirty colours. Irresistibly
the strangeness of Bacon’s vision imposes itself on you."

"Since the death of Picasso, Francis Bacon has, more than any
other painter, provided the age with an image, in Ezra Pound's phrase, of
its 'accelerated grimace'...He himself dates his career from the 1944
triptych Three figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in the Tate
Gallery. At first glance, this work still owes much to Picasso. It is a
stud, like the paintings and sketches of the Guernica period, of how
to assault the nervous system of an onlooker with formal equivalents for
pain, mental stress, distortions not of art merely but of daily living and
his own hold upon it...Like Eliot's early poetry, a direct influence,
Bacon's paintings are documentaries of nervous stress. Given the era in
which we find ourselves living, this comes as no surprise. What is
surprising is the attempt to endow our diminished psychological
circumstances with painting that can achieve the formal grandeur and the
beauty of texture of the greatest Old Masters. These characteristics remain,
in his best paintings, long after the initial assault on the system has worn
off. When things work, therefore, the quality achieved is joy, which is, as
Bacon said it should be, the purpose of art."

"Francis
Bacon was sui generis. He didn't even have precursors in the Borgesian sense
of the word - meaning precursors who were 'created' by him, whose work is
amended and endowed with previously unperceived meaning because of what it
has inadvertently engendered... Bacon came from nowhere and led nowhere;
indeed he might have elected to take such a course. His boasts of bibulous
gregariousness and his aptitude for acquaintanceship hardly disguise his
solitariness nor his concomitant lack of solidarity with other painters. He
painted what he had to paint, what chose him. More wittingly, he painted
what other painters didn't. He disliked the illustrative, the 'literary' and
the narrative as much as he did abstraction. It was the gap between these
poles that he occupied. Bacon was, however, part of a tradition of
representational experiment and of painting as something more than drawing
by other means. He was even perhaps the culmination of that tradition, the
last great modern painter, a manipulator of marks and thence of sentience,
of visceral and dorsal antennae. He addressed the core questions of human
existence with a grotesque wit and a high seriousness that are entirely
atypical of English practice... It is arguable that Bacon never painted
anything but himself. "

"Bacon can't paint a foot or an ear or a hand. Some of the curves he used to
describe physical forms are so slack they would have got him fired from a
Disney workshop. So Bacon smudged and threw paint and turned forms
back in on themselves and disrupted their logic, instinctively hiding his
own deficiencies. These smears of paint describing swollen and distended
shapes, especially in the portrait, seize attention and distract the eye
from what lies between. Which is nothing.Nothing will come of nothing. And Bacon's
nothing isn't even a black hole, it is a break down in communication. The
painting stops dead between the smears of pigment. There is nothing there
because it hasn't been described or constructed or placed.The process, an
eruption, sounds unpleasant, and it was; because the secret of Bacon's
successful work was the paint, like a gigantic eructation of pus. The Grand Guignol apparatus of screaming heads, the sides of raw meat, the smeared
visages underpinned this visceral sense of horror... He borrowed motifs,
fair enough, but imposed sketchily realised pictorial devices, like the
frame crudely articulated to impose some sense of control over the central
images sprawling like something from under a stone."

Michael McNay, Just a pile of paint and a nightmare of chic thrills,
The Guardian Weekend, 2-3 May, 1992.

"Some art is wallpaper. Bacon's is flypaper, and innumerable claims stick to
it: over the past 40 years it has attracted extremes of praise and
calumniation. There are still plenty of people who see his work as icily
mannered, sensationalist guignol. He is the sort of artist whose work
generates admiration rather than fondness... The truth is that the Bacon one
sees this time at the Tate has much more in common with old masters than
with contemporary painting. The paint acquires a wonderful plenitude in
becoming flesh. One thinks of the coruscated light, the Venetian red
interstitial drawing, in Tintoretto. This kind of paint surface is part of
the work of delivering sensations, not propositions, and it is neither idly
sumptuous nor 'ironically' sexy... None of this would be possible without
Bacon's mastery of the physical side of painting. Much has been made of his
reliance on chance, but it seems to have affected his life (he is an
inveterate gambler, an addict of the green baize) more than his art. One
could say the ejaculatory blurt of white paint in a painting like Two
Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968, is chancy, but that kind of
chance is easily manipulated with practice, and it rhymes suspiciously well
with other curves in the painting (like the back of the chair in the picture
within a picture to the left)... No one could imitate Bacon without looking
stupid. But to ignore him is equally absurd, for no other living painter has
set forth with such pitiless clarity the tensions and paradoxes that
surround all efforts to see, let alone to paint, the human figure in an age
of photography."

Robert Hughes, Singing Within The Bloody Wood; At the Tate, a second
celebration of Francis Bacon, TIME, 7th July, 1985.

"Bacon frequently said that he would like to paint pictures that affected
his nervous system with the raw violence of life itself - what he once
called, in a famous phrase 'the brutality of fact'. 'We nearly always live
through screens,' he told Sylvester. 'When people say my work looks violent,
perhaps I have been able to clear away one or two screens.'... He was, as
Sylvester puts it, 'interested in crisis. He would always tend to consider
how people behaved, or might behave, in an extreme situation, when people's
real quality was put to the test. So he was interested in violence and the
extreme. But I think violence, as against horror.'This love of extremity was balanced by a
fastidious, hypercritical streak - just as important to him as an artist and
a man... A lot of people have missed that beauty. 'I think Bacon has been
misunderstood, ' Sylvester insists. 'But, after all, most art is
misunderstood because people think it's like story-telling.'Sylvester
takes the case of the paintings which deal with the ghastly suicide of
Bacon's lover, George Dyer, found dead seated on the lavatory. 'The thing
about them which is so amazing is that even when somebody is being sick into
a basin, there's a kind of serenity in the composition. This is the
tradition of great art.'... Bacon gambled with paint, and didn't always win,
but Sylvester admires his nerve. 'I like about Bacon that craziness and
courage and lack of fear of being absurd. He really didn't care what people
thought. Well, he cared and he didn't care. I think that's a tremendous
force in an artist.' So, as time goes on, Bacon doesn't get smaller?
The answer is clear: 'Oh, he gets bigger, for me. He gets bigger.'..."

Martin Gayford, Agony or the Ecstasy?, The Daily Telegraph,
1997.

"By nature
as well as avocation Bacon is a gambler. His ability to take a risk and win
his wager, whether it be with life or art history, is part of his genius.
John Russell (in his book Francis Bacon) has characterized his
approach to painting as shooting for 'the National Gallery or the dust-bin.'
The risk he takes in his large triptychs is dictated by the goal he sets
himself: to achieve the freshness, the instinctive spontaneity of a small
sketch without sacrificing any of the formal grandeur inherent in a
well-composed large painting. To do this, he works directly on the full-size
canvas, without benefit of preliminary drawings. In bypassing the step of
adjusting scale, he eliminates the labored planning and cautious execution
that result in diminished vitality in many large paintings. Once a
background has been summarily blocked in, the figure or figures are fully
painted in a rash of semi-controlled marks. If the result is worth
preserving, more background is then added around the finished figure. When
unsuccessful, the canvas is destroyed in the way other painters tear up
their sketches. At a time when museums are tending to remove the glass from
all but the most valuable paintings and when artists are shying away from
notions of fine art and precious objects, it is rare to find a painter who
wants his work to be presented in so formal and even sumptuous a manner.
Bacon explains that the glass is to 'remove the images further. I don't
think art is available; it's rare and curious and should be completely
isolated. One is more away of its magic the more it's isolated.' The
dualistic nature of Bacon's art - the ability to maintain a balance between
the 'vivid' and the 'formal,' to achieve the integration of small-sketch
sensibility and large-canvas grandeur, to exploit the tension between
figurative resemblance and the abstract accidentalism of technique -
accounts for his success in eluding categorization."

"One can only say you
absorb all types of things which go into a kind of pulveriser in the
unconscious and may come out as something quite different later. I was
always fascinated by images, and I looked at everything. I destroyed most of
those early pictures as I didn't like them, but I was very influenced by
Picasso, especially the paintings he did between 1925 and 1927 0f figures on
a beech. Everybody is influenced at the start - it is the spark that sets
one off. I don't think it matters even if one goes on being influenced -
some of the greatest paintings, like Cimabue's Crucifixion, are based
on what has been done before; only someone new comes along and does it
better. Any painting that works today is linked to the past. In a way
it was better when there wasn't so much individuality. But because today
there is no tradition and no myths, people are thrown back on their own
sensibility. Abstract art was perhaps one attempt at getting away from this,
but it never worked because the artists made their own patterns in their own
ways. That is why American art is, on the whole, boring. They want to start
from nothing. I understand their position: they are trying to create a new
culture and identity. But why try to be so limited? I am trying to work as
close to my own nervous system as I can, but my painting is not illustrative
and has no message; it is an image. If I wanted to express philosophy I
would write, not paint. Sometimes I feel I am not working at all, just
pushing the brushes here and there. In some of my most successful pictures
the image has come through as a result of accidental movements of the brush.
I believe one is born and one dies and only what one does between
these two absolute points counts. Also, painting is an old man's occupation.
Some of the greatest have done their best work in old age: Titian and
Picasso and others. So I hope I shall go on and drop dead while working.
When all is said and done what matters is instinct."

"During the long period
when Francis Bacon returned again and again to the compulsive task of
painting a shouting Pope, many people found it difficult to come to terms
with the fact that he is one of the greatest painters of the twentieth
century. Since then the artist himself has come to their aid by giving the
paint a certain narcissistic demonstrativeness, almost as if it were a
personage in its own right, and like the bride who hogs the photograph of
the happy couple, it has become, to use the obsolete phrase, the cynosure of
all eyes. Some spectators who were hitherto repelled by the mixed emotions
aroused in them by his imagery find no difficulty in considering the recent
pictures exhibited in Paris and London as brilliant configurations of paint,
addressed exclusively to the aesthetic sense. These paint-strokes, more
active than anything in action painting, are as marvellously certain of
themselves as the paint-strokes with which Rembrandt investigated his own
aging face, and there are summary flourishes at the edges of some of the
portraits - such as the heavenly blue swirls on the jacket in the portrait
of Isobel Rawsthorne purchased for the Tate collection - which demonstrates
a virtuosity as dazzling as John Singer Sargent's used to be. Any
dislocation of the features in these portraits must be attributed to the
artist's realization that the malleability of flesh is Nature's supreme gift
to human pleasure. It will be seen that under the activity of the
brush-strokes the faces retain the impassivity of the posing model, and
ensure the slaps and slashes and the expert bruising with all the
submissiveness of a multitude of Christs at the mercy of a single tormentor.
Some of the paintings in his present exhibition would look at home beside
Velasquez, for he has somehow come to a kind of neutrality. The paint has
never looked more authoritative and voluptuous, and it gives what people
think of as his 'tragic awareness' an almost ingratiating blandness. Pulling
vicarious flesh this way and that, he has settled into a macabre serenity."

"Bacon's
earliest paintings were mostly pastiches of Picasso; though attractive, they
failed to sell. Since this driven, as yet unformed artist had no desire to
be perceived as a pasticheur, he destroyed most of them. He continued
sporadically to paint and decorate, but devoted most of his energies to
gambling. Successive stays at Monte Carlo—hence the glimpses of
Mediterranean vegetation in the early works—financed by a lover, enabled him
to become an expert roulette player as well as a canny croupier in private
games. He would approach painting in much the same way as he approached
gambling, risking everything on a single brushstroke. Never having attended
an art school was a source of pride to Bacon. With the help of a
meretricious Australian painter, Roy de Maistre, he taught himself to paint,
for which he turned out to have a great flair; tragically, he failed to
teach himself to draw. Painting after painting would be marred by his
inability to articulate a figure or its space. Peppiatt recalls that,
decades later, so embarrassed was Bacon at being asked by a Parisian
restaurateur to do a drawing in his livre d'or that he doubled the tip and
made for the exit. After Bacon's death, David Sylvester, the artist's
Boswell-cum-Saatchi, attempted to turn this deficiency into an advantage. In
a chapter of his posthumous miscellany, entitled Bacon's Secret Vice,
he proposed an 'alternative view' of this fatal flaw: 'His most articulate
and helpful sketches took the form of the written word.' The
'precisely worded' examples that supposedly demonstrate the linguistic
origin of Bacon's paintings turn out to be a preposterous joke: offhand
notes scrawled on the endpapers of a book about monkeys: Figure upside
down on sofa; Two figures on sofa making love; Acrobat on
platform in middle of room; and so on. Sylvester's contention that this
shopping list constitutes 'Bacon's most articulate and helpful sketches'
raises doubt about the rest of his sales pitch."

John
Richardson, Bacon Agonistes, The New York Review of Books,
Volume 56, Number 20, December 17th, 2009.

"Bacon's view of the absurd has nothing in common with existentialism , or
with the work of an artist like Samuel Beckett. Beckett approaches despair
as a result of questioning, as a result of trying to unravel the language of
the conventionally given answers. Bacon questions nothing, unravels nothing.
He accepts the worst has happened. His lack of alternatives, within his view
of the human condition, is reflected in the lack of any thematic development
in his life's work. Bacon's art is, in effect, conformist. It is not with
Goya or the early Einstein that he should be compared, but with Walt Disney.
Both men make propositions about the alienated behaviour of our societies;
and both, in a different way, persuade the viewer to accept what is. Disney
makes alienated behaviour look funny and sentimental and, therefore,
acceptable. Bacon interprets such behaviour in terms of the worst possible
having already happened, and so proposes that both refusal and hope are
pointless. The surprising formal similarities of their work - the ways limbs
are distorted, the overall shape of their bodies, the relation of figures to
background and to one another, the use of neat tailor's clothes, the gesture
of hands, the range of colours used - are the result of both men having
complementary attitudes to the same crisis. Disney's world is also charged
with vain violence. The ultimate catastrophe is always in the offing.
His creatures have both personality and nervous reactions; what they lack
(almost) is mind. If, before a cartoon sequence by Disney, one read and
believed the caption, There is nothing else, the film would strike us
as horrifically as a painting by Bacon.
Bacon’s paintings do not comment, as is often said, on any actual experience
of loneliness, anguish or metaphysical doubt; nor do they comment on social
relations, bureaucracy, industrial society or the history of the 20th century.
To do any of these things they would have to be concerned with
consciousness. What they do is to demonstrate how alienation may provoke a
longing for its own absolute form - which is mindlessness. This is the
consistent truth demonstrated, rather than expressed, in Bacon's work."

"Do Bacon's paintings suggest that
crucifixion is a sexual act and sex an act of crucifixion? Two Figures in
the Grass (1954) is slightly less obvious in its depiction of the sexual
act. Without the title, in fact, it is difficult to discern that the
painting contains two figures. The sex act's ability to blur lines between
independent bodies is a recurring theme in Bacon's work; corporeal
integrity, the self's physical boundary, is a casualty of erotic pleasure.
The one clearly discernable figure is in motion, his powerful legs and
well-rounded buttocks in plain view. If the grey-pink blur of paint on the
far left edge is the second figure's head, unlike the grimacing entity of
the 1953 painting, it appears to be turning and giving its partner a kiss.
At the same time, the blurriness that indicates motion, combined with the
figures placement on the painting's edge, suggests that one figure has
pursued, captured, and forced the other into this amorous embrace. Despite
the kiss, violence is not absent from this painting. The wrestling figures
in the central panel of Studies from the Human Body are muscular,
but they have no heads; through intercourse, their bodies have coalesced
into a single lump of flesh. These paintings suggest that any motion -
copulating, walking, dancing, dying - undoes the body. Insofar violence is a
gesture which marks, reshapes, and distorts the body, Studies from the
Human Body suggests, as do the crucifixion paintings, and the Dyer
portraits, that life is a violent experience. On the other hand, this
equivalence empties violence of content and robs it of moral force. On the
other, it highlights the anxiety that is deflected and contained by
narratives of subjective stability, bodily integrity, and phallic
superiority. By gesturing towards forces of dissolution in the most mundane
aspects of lived experience - perception, representation, movement, and time
- Bacon's paintings undermine ideologies and rhetorics of wholeness,
solidity, and stability that undergird the gendered distribution of power in
contemporary culture. The anxiety generated by Bacon's painting centers on
the body. These bodies are disturbing because they are recognizably human
despite their distortion. They contain just enough reality. Bacon's
paintings display human body's decline; they are tragic because the figure
cannot flee its demise. We are repulsed, nauseated, terrified, undone
precisely because we identify with the bodies Bacon paints; we cannot not
see our mortality, fragility, and instability in his distorted figures.
Bacon's body-in-crisis is not, however, a generic body; the body that
garners his attention is, almost exclusively, a male-body-in-pain."